THE RAW RANT: Clash Of Champions 2016

26th September 2016by Danny Damage

Hello and thanks for showing up to rant, rave and reflect on the latest Raw Live Pay-Per-View. Here is your host, hailing from a dark corner in the North East of England, it’s Danny Damage.

Kick Off Show.

I’m not really sure why I bother watching Renee’s Respite Centre for the demented, decrepit and dehydrated. Booker T is CONSTANTLY saying the wrong wordy things that he’s paid to say, Lawler is just a mumbling mess, daydreaming about all the fanny he’s taken advantage of and Lita just comes across like she can’t be arsed/she has no place else to go!

Alicia Fox vs. Nia Jax

Nia, SMASH!

Well, it wasn’t totally one sided, but whenever Foxy started to make a comeback, she got swatted down hastily and then finished off with a Samoan Drop.

And now, it’s time for:

#WWEClash

[c] Big E & Kofi Kingston (w/Xavier Woods) vs. Gallows & Anderson

The New Day retain as Xavier capitalised on a distracted referee, clocking Anderson in the head with Francesca II.

This sets up Big E and Kofi to hit The Midnight Hour and get even closer to breaking Demolition’s title reign record.

Gallows and Anderson looked hard as fuck in this match. Xavier needing to get involved just galvanised my perception of this. Nevertheless, a great match to open the show.

#Cruiserweight

Brian Kendrick vs. [c] T.J Perkins

Perkins retains, making Kendrick submit to a Knee Bar.

He offers Kendrick a handshake, who accepts it, hugs him.

Kendrick lures in and sticks nut on the champ before leaving.

A nice first showing of the Cruiserweights on a PPV. They weren’t on first, or on the pre-show, which was a bonus too.

#BestOf7

Cesaro (3 points) vs. Sheamus (3 points)

They fought to a no contest.

Cesaro is a fucking mentalist for that suicide dive!

They beat ten buckets of shit out of each other and pretty much both collapsed after Cesaro Clotheslined Sheamus over the barricade and into the crowd.

Ringside officials called the match off and the crowd weren’t happy.

Match of the night I’d say. The lads threw everything they had into it and they had the crowd begging for more, which no one was expecting.

Chris Jericho vs. Sami Zayn

Jericho won with a Codebreaker out of nowhere after trying every trick in the book to get an easy win, but eventually finding an opening.

They put on a sweet match and did a great job of picking the crowd back up after everyone was left confused and disappointed with the Cesaro and Sheamus finish.

#WomensTitle

Bayley vs. [c] Charlotte (w/Dana Brooke) vs. Sasha Banks

Charlotte ended up knocking Bayley out cold with a Big Boot AGAIN.

Having Dana out there was stupid. She could have just joined in the fight at any time, especially when Charlotte was getting locked in submission holds more often than when she got involved.

#USTitle

Roman Reigns vs. [c] Rusev (w/Lana)

I see that Roman’s biggest fan managed to get decent seats at least. Good for him.

Lana gets ejected towards the end, but she saved Rusev at the time from getting pinned after being hit with a Spear by pulling the referee out of the ring during the pin-fall.

Rusev wallows as his love is sent packing.

This is obviously too much trauma for Rusev to handle and he’s speared out of his boots for a second time.

Everyone in the WWE Universe rejoices as their favourite Superstar has beaten the big, bad, dirty foreign monster.

I bet the fans have a lovely, welcoming celebration waiting for him on Raw Live.

#WWEUniversalTitle

[c] Kevin Owens vs. Seth Rollins

Owens obviously aims for Seth’s rehabilitated knee as soon as the opportunity arises and keeps him grounded as often as possible.

Rollins clears a table for two, much to the horror of the announce team.

They forget about that for a while and end up back in the ring.

Owens drags Rollins to the table that was cleared earlier.

Rollins is aware enough to get out of the way of a running Senton.

Rollins manages to overcome and it looks like he’s about to win, until Chris Jericho runs down and causes a distraction or two.

His efforts fail to secure Owens the win and then the referee takes a bump.

Rollins manages to fend off both of Team Canada and hits Owens with a Pedigree, but there’s no referee to count the pin.

Rollins is still on top, so Jericho ambushes him while there’s no conscious official.

Rollins continues to succeed in a handicap match and neutralises Jericho. He nudges the referee outside with the whole “shake him around by the belt to wake him up” routine.

Eventually, Stephanie restores order with her presence and a new official.

This causes Rollins to divert his eyes long enough for Owens to hit the Pop-up Powerbomb and retain his title.

Steph looks on.

The best buddies go home to celebrate with a plate of Kraft Dinner.

Afterthoughts.

A fantastic show for the majority. Well worth a watch. I’ll be watching again with a barrel of chicken with some friends before Raw Live anyway.

Good Shit:

Cesaro & Sheamus. They turned it around. No one really cared to start with, myself included. A few more heads turned as Sheamus became one win away from a clean sweep, but by the time this match was called off by officials, everyone wanted them to continue fighting.

Great wrestling. Wasn’t a bad match on the card.

T.J. Perkins. I imagine that I’m one of very many, but I’ve fallen for that entrance/theme song.

Bad Shit:

Cesaro. I appreciate that a big part of his job is taking risks for my entertainment, but there are limits, surely. After spending some time watching Big E do his Suicide Spear and mostly land on his head with my arse cheeks clenched tighter than a nun’s cunt, I’d be happy for folk to stop doing stupidly dangerous shit like this.

The New Day. Nothing wrong with the rest of the match, just the finish. I can get behind faces outsmarting their opposition, even with a third man, but having them blatantly resort to the third guy having to physically get involved, says even less about his allies in the ring.

Presentation. I’ve said this before, but I guess I’m going to have to say it again; WWE NEED to employ someone, anyone, that’s worked in a theatre/has performed on the stage. Choreographically speaking, watching the end sequence during the main event was a fucking chore and a half. But once again, WWE don’t care how sloppy it looked at the time as long as they can cut it down for a nice little highlight package to spam on Raw Live. I was screaming the same argument at the screen last week with the efforts made to make Bray Wyatt appear to be teleporting around the place.

Charlotte. No one needed to see her angry sex face.

Slipping In A Quick One

Tom Philips’ shape-shifting abilities aren’t a new topic for discussion by any means, but last night presented two of my now favourite bits of evidence in the #Tomspiracy trial.

Philips is six feet tall.

Perkins is billed five feet and ten inches.

Cesaro is billed as six foot five inches.

Digest and discuss! You can follow me as I work away on Twitter (@BluntDamage) for additional nuggets of wisdom and also on Instagram (@DannyBluntDamage) to see me shoot photographs of my other hobbies and guilty pleasures. Thanks for reading, take care and I’ll see you next week!

The New Day beginning of the show (the ending of the match) gave me so bitter test in my mouth that it lasted throughout the entire show. The finish was horrendously sloppy booked with the babyfaces BLATANTLY cheating for the W.

TJ needs to tighten this knee bar of his. It looks ridiculous. At the ending of the CWC when he modified it looked way, way better and believable.

You have cruiserweights on the show now. Please stop doing dives in every freaking match without any particular reason. Sure, pull one big one once in a while on a PPV, but doing one just for the sake of doing and the stupid cheap pop? Please don’t.

Jeicho wins clean – is poor Sami in a purgatory or something? Wasn’t he the last one to defeat Kevin clean in the middle of the ring 1, 2, 3?

The girls worked really, really hard and had one pretty good match. I might have even liked it best on the show. And then there were those Dana interferences. *sighs*

Why we hate on Roman? Well, cause we’ve been watching Cena for 10 years kicking out and breaking out of everything. Don’t need the same guy (who is actually and a weaker version) twice, thank you very much. We’ve just got rid of one Superman.

Poor Brock…

Main Event was OK with the classic WWE imbecilic finish, alas. Oh, wait, the actual finish was with Steph and Trips leaving together, but we never saw it. Great!

Liked the show, but there was stuff there that was like sore thumbs. Left me really confused. Gave it thumbs up, but I think the SmackDownLIVE Network Special show before it was (overall) better.